On the fine art of procrastination

Years ago I did an interview with Mark Rein-Hagen of White Wolf Games in which he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I split my time between actual writing and creating." Tongue firmly planted in cheek I said the creation going on in that office had to be monumental. because there wasn't much writing going on .I was joking, of course, because really, he wasn't wrong.

Procrastination is a relative thing, but for me, as a writer, even when I'm doing nothing, there's a lot going on. When I'm driving log distances the odds are good that I'll have music going and I'll be plotting out a novel or a short story. When I'm watching TV, the same thing. When Im talking to people, not so much, because actual conversation requires that I pay attention.

When I'm reading a book, I'm automatically correlating the information into my reading list. Not on a conscious level, but often just to make certain that what I'm reading isn't too similar to what I'm working on,.When I wrote BLOOD RED I literally read fifty books on vampires and watched easily thirty movies for the exact same reason. Research is important. There are a LOT of vampire novels out there and a little crossover is going to happen but I wanted to try to make what I was doing as unique as possible.

Here's the thing: writers are often daydreamers. Even when doing nothing, the mind wants to wander and play what if. For that reason I will gleefully encourage procrastination, so long as it's within reason. Twiddling your thumbs will never take the place of hard work when it comes to putting food on the table. I can daydream a day away, but I still need to meet or exceed my word count whenever humanly possible.

Procrastination as a Positive

I’ve been a bit down the rabbit hole lately. An apropos metaphor for this post as I found this photo in a college friend’s scrapbook. That’s me at eighteen, dressed as Alice in Wonderland for a sorority party. This last weekend I met with a lot of my sorority sisters from college. We celebrated our chapters 100th anniversary, which meant we spent a lot of time talking, resurrecting old memories. We also met with the collegians currently in the chapter – as young and fresh-faced as I was then.

And this photo is me, too, many years later, taken by my friend, Karen Koonce Weesner, who I met as a pledge sister when I was eighteen. We gave a talk to the collegians and assembled alumnae. I called it “Now We Are Fifty” – and we wished that those girls would have the blessing of that same kind of lifelong friendship.

It’s been a good month for me that way. I spent a weekend with Grace Draven, and then my lovely friend Anne Calhoun came to visit me. This coming week I’m spending with family, celebrating my mom’s birthday.

I am overflowing with love and the best kind of connections.

Which is a wonderful thing, as there’s been some upheaval in my writing career the last couple of weeks also. The good kind! Out of respect for the people involved, I can’t tell you much until the end of March, but it’s going to be a really good change for me. But, you know, Alice taught us that about change – growing taller, smaller, eat me, drink me, through the looking glass – it’s always painful.

All of this means that I haven’t been writing very much. I’ve been taking a lot of days off to handle business, to travel, to be with people. When I have been writing, the project has gone slowly because all the upheaval has changed the trajectory of what I’m doing. Sometimes it’s felt like I’m procrastinating. I certainly haven’t been holding myself to a rigid schedule or wordcount production. 

I remind myself, though, that none of that means I’m not working on the book. Or books, which is what it really is.

That’s the topic for the week – When Procrastination Is Your Friend. There’s a lot that goes into writing. Done correctly, the stories we spin grow out of who we are, how we feel, what we’re experiencing. Instead of procrastinating this last month, I’m letting myself call it a time of refilling. All of these conversations and time spent strolling through wonderland and old scrapbooks are ways of relaxing and reliving.

So are stories.

I’ll be ready to write again soon.

Love to all my sisters in Gamma Phi Beta, in TTKE

Worldbuilding with Elderly and Young

A timely topic because in my personal, actual world, I now have a new grandbaby, and have been spending huge amounts of time where he lives.

So as I understand it (running on not too much sleep here, folks), this week we're to discuss whether we include older and younger folks in our books as secondary characters, or just the stalwart heroes and heroines? Well, there's a running joke between my editor and me that I tend to add a child to every book, whether the plot needs one or not, so....

My first scifi romance, Wreck of the Nebula Dream, is my futuristic version of the sinking of the Titanic, and as such, I definitely included children, Paolo and Gianna, a brother and sister who were my tribute to all the Third Class children who perished on Titanic. Every single adult main character in the book is dedicated to ensuring these two survive, and the children also have their key moment to be front and center in the plot. There's also a very elderly woman, Lady Damais, who is part of my small group of passengers trying to find a way to get off the Nebula Dream and survive.

My second published SFR was Escape From Zulaire, and one of the main plot points is that the human heroine, Andi, is trying to save the toddler son of the planetary ruler. She and the child and a small group of Sectors soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines when warfare breaks out.

My third SFR was Mission to Mahjundar and my editor put her foot down about why was there a child in the book and what plot point was he supposed to be advancing? I realized I'd written so much about him that at times the entire focus of the book drifted away from the hero and heroine. The thing was I'd given this boy such a great backstory....but it wasn't needed. I tried editing him out of a chapter entirely, as a test, and yup, you'd never miss him. So he was deleted entirely. Nothing is ever lost, of course, so maybe he'll show up in another book in the future, where he does belong.

Since then I watch out for my apparent inclination to add a child to the mix. I guess the point to me is that I include whatever characters are necessary for the plot to advance, and I happily assume all the rest of the population of the universe is happily doing their thing offstage.

The Gaps in the World

I'm sitting beside someone playing The Division. It's a computer game set in NYC just after Christmas - a Christmas wherein someone infected dollar bills with a genetically engineered virus. He put the bills in circulation and the virus wiped out a broad swath of the population. The premise of the game is that it's January. The player is an agent in a clandestine organization called The Division. The player is activated as a means of reclaiming the city and lending aid to the remaining survivors.

Amazing world building. The story tellers/game developers seriously thought through the threats, the challenges, and the ways people would react to the disaster. They really considered how long it would take for essential services to break down - how long it would take official government agencies to sweep in and cordon off the city before they, too, started dying.

But there are some serious gaps, if not in world building, then in logic. All of the firetrucks and police cars have their lights on and flashing. The cars are abandoned, their hoods crumbled, but their batteries are still good, by God! However. People have been dead for so long that all the dogs in the city have become feral. The single biggest miss by the dev team? The dogs aren't roving in packs.

Do you know how long it takes dogs to revert to feral? It's a researchable parameter. Not to mention that anyone who's watched a single National Geographic episode knows that dogs are social animals. They require a pack. In our homes, the accept their human families as pack substitutes. Were that family suddenly taken away and a dog had to fend for itself, it would have to have another pack. The dog would automatically seek other humans and ask for help. If that didn't work and the dog didn't simply starve, it would, for its own psychological survival, have to join a pack of other free-roaming dogs.

It seems like a little thing, doesn't it? But it's indicative, to me, of some lazy world building within the game. Someone simply went, "Cool element! Feral dogs!" But no one bothered to ask a simple question. "Hey. If the dogs went wild, why are the crumpled cop cars still flashing red and blue? I mean their car batteries died in the first 72 hours, right?"

It's proof that misses don't have to be great big hairy things. It's the little things that build up over time and really start to bug people. Ask Walking Dead fans whose visages harden and whose lips thin ever so slightly whenever the Rick and the group drive past an obviously cultivated field or a mowed lawn 2 years after the zombie apocalypse. (Also, why do the cars still start? Have you ever had gasoline varnish in an engine after a single season??)

World building is very much akin to the cultural iceberg - we only see the tiny bit above the surface, but there's an entire huge structure underpinning what we see. That invisible structure requires deep thinking if you're going to be creating it. It is where the 'why' comes from for your world. If the 'why' is firmly in place, a writer is less likely to miss the kinds of world building elements that'll get books tossed across the room.

I, personally, have a pet peeve about time travel stories. I have yet to see a movie with time travel as an element that didn't shoot itself right the timeline. (Meaning the story creates an Asimov Paradox even after Isaac Asimov described the paradox so writers could avoid it.)

What world building/consistency misses rub your fur the wrong way?

Worldbuilding: The Forgotten Details

It would be impossible-- and also pointless-- to cover every possible element of worldbuilding.  You would have to gain a decent mastery of dozens of disciplines, including but hardly limited to geology, biology, meteorology, ecology, zoology, botany, astronomy, sociology, anthropology, architecture... the list could go on.  And that's just the fundamentals.  

Of course, all that is if you're doing a full-on, from-the-bottom-up worldbuild, which you'd have to be some kind of lunatic to even want to attempt.  (Yeah, I kind of want to...)  

No matter what, there will be all sorts of details that will be left out.  It's inevitable.  And there are any number of fine-points that you'll gloss over in your worldbuid that I could address.  I'm going to delve into a specific one: the history of the world.  Most of the time any worldbuilder will outline the big points: the wars, the revolutions, the queens and kings, the founders and the traitors.  

But what about the less obvious things?  What about the philosophers, the scientists, the creators?  What about the people who guided the culture to where it is?

In your worldbuild, ask yourself: who is the Euclid?  Who is the Newton?  Who is the Aristotle or Socrates?  Who is the Homer or the Shakespeare or the Michelangelo?  The Martin Luther or Adam Smith or daVinci?

Or on a different scale: who founded the nation? What is their Magna Carta or Constitution and who wrote it?  Why did they write it?

Now, do you have to answer all these questions?  And if you do, do the answers have to end up on the page? (No.)  But I think there's a lot of value in thinking about these things, that it can add a richness to your worldbuilding that will translate to your writing.

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Mixing high fantasy and urban fantasy, The Holver Alley Crew is the first novel of Maresca’s third interconnected series set in the fantasy city of Maradaine.

The Rynax brothers had gone legit after Asti Rynax’s service in Druth Intelligence had shattered his nerves, and marriage and fatherhood convinced Verci Rynax to leave his life of thievery.  They settled back in their old neighborhood in West Maradaine and bought themselves a shop, eager for a simple, honest life. Then the Holver Alley Fire incinerated their plans. With no home, no shop, and no honest income—and saddled with a looming debt—they fall back on their old skills and old friends.

With a crew of other fire victims, Asti and Verci plan a simple carriage heist, but the job spirals out of control as they learn that the fire was no accident. Lives in Holver Alley were destroyed out of a sadistic scheme to buy the land.  Smoldering for revenge, burdened with Asti’s crumbling sanity, the brothers lead their crew of amateurs and washouts to take down those responsible for the fire, no matter the cost.

READ AN EXCERPT

Goodreads Page for THE HOLVER ALLEY CREW

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and more!

Worldbuilding: Kids and Elderly

When it comes to world building, there are many things that don't get much consideration. Often, the storyline is completely about able-bodies adults, most of whom are in the prime of their life. But what about the younger and older generations?

Those with high level Life Experience...the Elderly:

I'm far from 'elderly' but as a mid-forties mom, I've been around the block. I want to share my lessons with my boys to help them avoid repeating my mistakes or wasting time. Of course, sometimes they don't want to listen, and sometimes I don't understand the things they are talking about. (Like anything Xbox, technical, etc.) This is, in essense, where the elderly typically get lumped/typecast in a story. But the non-twenty-and-thirty-somethings have much to offer.

Examples:

Even Bilbo Bagginns at 111 was pretty kick ass, though that was because of the ring. Wizards are typically older, but still very vital, if Gandalf is any indication--especially his fight with Saruman. Han Solo and Leia and Luke are passing of the torch with heartbreaking grace. Personally, I loved that scene in Battleship where the old vets run the museum ship and attack the enemy. I thought that was fantastic, showing their input remains vital...but then as a former VFW bartender, vets are special to me. 

Outside of those charaters, when I think of elderly characters, I think of Dragonslayer.

Ralph Richardson played Ulrich, the wizard. Spoiler: after giving cryptic instructions to his apprentice, he allowed himself to be killed. The instructions were for his resurrection. Because he was too old to make the journey. And because wizards are sneaky shits.

Ask yourself: 

If you're worldbuilding, consider what hardships and benefits the older generation might have. How can you use this or show this in your story? Does a supporting character have a grandpa they have to help as well as the hero? If the heroes gramma is a major motivator, does the hero/ine see that gramma is focused on them instead of their own woes, and if so what impact does this have on hero/ine? What gut emotional impact can you bring to your story by allowing a glimpse or hard scrutiny of the elderly around the hero/ine?

Those with minimal Life Experience...the Kiddoes:

The fun here is watching them discover something for the first time, or seeing them putting it all together in their head and having their own opinions and ideas about it, whatever 'it' is.

Examples:

The Harry Potter series covered a great scope of childhood, from magic candy, magic sports, and magic school pressures. Rowling hit on family issues good and bad, peer pressure, clothes, grades, everything. Stranger Things has zeroed in on some pretty intelligent kids (D&D gamers, so creative but truly thinking) from the 80s and I dig their story and characterization. 

But those are both modern-era. What about kids in medieval-type times? Oh, yeah. George RR Martin has shown the perks of bloodline, deaths for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the surprise of being sacrificed, and the upside of being dangerous and 'overlooked.'  As for futuristic, space? I dunno. Does Wesley Crusher count?

Ask yourself: 

In your world, how are children viewed? Are they educated, well fed, and do they have toys? Are they spoiled, lazy and distracted? Or are they taught to revere information? Are they given choices when they are understandably too young to understand the consequences? They are typically all about self-discovery. How can you step aside from that in your world and bring something fresh to the page?

Y U No Poo? Elements Left Out of Worldbuilding

Hygiene and basic bodily functions tend be glossed over in World Building...unless killing someone on the john is a plot point (hiya, GRRM). Rarely does our protagonist take time away from the action to brush their teeth, wash their hands, or pee. They only head to the loo when the setting of the bathroom is important (fist-fight, clandestine meeting, assassination, hiding from an assassination, etc.). Even then, it's only one potty visit for the whole novel. There are endless memes for 24: When Does Jack Bauer Pee (pretty sure Eric Carter's going to have the same problem, fwiw).

Anyone who has kids, a vindictive bladder, or a digestive system that functions like clockwork knows where the restrooms are and visits before jumping into the next adventure. Office, gas stations, Target, rest stops, port-a-pots at the farmer's market...real world logistics are planned around potties. In SFF worldbuilding? We'll send our fearless posse into the glacial canyon, covered in eighteen pelts of wild beasts they slaughtered and skinned with their own hands...and no one is concerned about copping a squat in sub-zero temperatures.

Or toilet paper. 

How many of our fearless heroes are running the gantlet with grungy butt?

We skip that shit (literally) because readers don't want to know, unless, again, it serves a plot point.

Now, showers, on the other hand, they are the literary stars of the bathroom. Giggity-giggity.

Mind the Gap

Once again, the challenge of writing AFTER Jeffe is the same. She's very good at covering topics.

That said, I'll expound a little here.

World building is a BEAR. I mean that. It's a bear that refuses to be tamed and now and then it takes a bite to make sure you know who's in charge.

here's WHY it's a bear. Far too often I've seen writers throw their story aside for several thousand words at a time to drop roughly for trucks' worth of information at one time. Here's the shape of the closest city. These are the types of buildings. Here's the history of the Council of Wizards, complete with the painstaking methods they used to raise their tower above the city, one stone at a time. Each stone is a moment in time frozen in place, a historical note. Naturally, it's best to reflect on at least a hundred of those before we move on in the story.

Then, just for kicks, if we could describe the types of trees that are running near the river that runs to the west of the city versus the sort that are on the side of the lake to the north.

Now, of course, fashions. What are the paupers wearing? the assassins guild? The elves? The ogres from the bog down the way and how often to the ogres attack?

And then, the writer remembers that there's a guy on a horse (our main character) who has to go forward into the town and have an adventure.

NO!

That's the best way in the world to tick me off as a reader. The information is like peanut butter: better if you spread it around in a nice thin layer, rather than leaving one massive clump in the center of the bread.

How much detail to use?I'm with Jeffe. I like a lot of open spaces for interpretation. I never want to know exactly how many freckles there are on a character's shoulders and face. I don't need that much info.


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